PDFInfo Tips: Speed Up PDF Analysis and Metadata Extraction

PDFInfo: Quick Guide to Extracting Metadata from PDFs

What pdfinfo is

pdfinfo (part of Poppler/poppler-utils) is a command-line tool that prints a PDF’s Info dictionary and other useful file-level details: title, author, creator, producer, creation/modification dates, page count, page size, PDF version, file size, encryption/permissions, whether the PDF is tagged/has metadata or JavaScript, and more.

Install

• Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
• macOS (Homebrew): brew install poppler

Basic usage

• Show basic metadata:

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  pdfinfo file.pdf 

• Read from stdin:

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  pdfinfo - 

Useful options

• -meta — print the PDF metadata stream
• -custom — print custom and standard metadata
• -js — print JavaScript in the PDF
• -struct / -struct-text — print logical structure (Tagged PDF) / structure with text
• -box — print MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox, ArtBox
• -url — list URLs (annotations)
• -f N -l M — examine pages N through M (prints sizes/bounding boxes per page if range used)
• -isodates — print dates in ISO-8601 format
• -rawdates — print raw PDF date strings
• -opw / -upw — owner/user password for encrypted PDFs
• -enc encoding-name — set output encoding (default UTF-8)
• -v / -h — version / help

Example outputs

• General example:

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  Title:Report Q4 Author:         Alice Smith Creator:        Microsoft Word Producer:       Mac OS X Quartz PDFContext CreationDate:   2024-11-12T09:15:00Z ModDate:        2024-11-12T09:20:00Z Pages:          12 Encrypted:      no Page size:      612 x 792 pts (letter) File size:      234567 bytes PDF version:    1.7 

• Metadata stream (use -meta):

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  <?xpacket begin=“…”?> …/x:xmpmeta
  

Scripting tips

• Parse output into a key/value map in scripts (grep/sed/awk or a language wrapper).
• Example: get page count in shell:

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  pdfinfo file.pdf | awk -F: ‘/^Pages/ {print $2+0}’ 

• Use pdfinfo alongside other poppler tools: pdftotext, pdfimages, pdffonts, pdfseparate, pdfunite.

When to use pdfinfo

• Quickly inspect document metadata and properties before processing or publishing.
• Detect encryption or unexpected producers/creators.
• Automate metadata checks in CI or batch processing scripts.

Limitations

• Reads and reports what’s stored in the PDF — metadata can be missing or intentionally altered.
• URL extraction is limited to supported annotation types; it won’t search plain text for HTTP strings.

If you want, I can provide a ready-to-run shell script or a small Python wrapper that parses pdfinfo output into JSON.